AeroLED Troubleshooting

[Frostbite023]

I know there's a multitude of reasons why this may be occurring but my left (red) aeroled strobe is malfunctioning. The strobe has become very faint and basically shut off, and the red led is dim as well. My mechanic took it off and was inspecting the wires when it went back to full brightness, we reinstalled it, then after starting the plane up it slowly dimmed out and went pretty much dark again. Yesterday I repeated what he did, turned on the lights, verified it was dim, then unbolted the light and gently pulled the wires out and "bam", the lights came back on full brightness. Would I be smart to assume that there's nothing wrong with the light itself, its definitely a wiring issue? Maybe there's a bare wire in the wing somewhere that is making contact with metal? Is it a difficult task to pull the entire wiring out to inspect? I was thinking just attach a rope to one end, pull it out the other side to inspect, and then pull the rope to fish it back through. I also have a borescope so I was thinking of inspecting with that but if there's an issue I'm going to have to remove the wiring regardless so I might as well start there.

 

[Bob Y]

I had the EXACT problem with my left light. Long story short, the ground was poor. I ended up pulling another ground through the bushing at the landing light and terminating another ground for the nav light at the landing-light ground point. It’s impossible to access the original nav ground, so moving it to another point solved my issue. Again, I had the same symptoms.

 

[rtlongdon]

About 8 months ago I had the same issue on the left side. I tracked mine down to a one of the 4 pins in the Molex connector (the ground pin) being both loose (the female side) and corroded. I replaced all 8 contacts total on the M/F sides.. I also inspected the right side fixture and found the same issue in the making, so I re-pinned that side as well. I'm not a big fan of the Molex, but in this connectors defense, I'm pretty sure the pins were crimped with needle nose and/or a 3 pound drilling hammer and chisel. The proper crimp tool worked wonders in my case!